Imagining Roman Britain: Victorian Responses to a Roman Past (review)

The Victorian fascination with ancient Greece and Rome has long been established. "Clearly, three centuries after the Renaissance, it was still the mark of a cultivated gentleman to be conversant with Latin and Greek," writes Norman Vance in The Victorians and Ancient Rome (qtd. in Hoselitz 14). "The age-old fascination with ancient Rome continued and flourished in and beyond the nineteenth century, not merely surviving alongside but in some cases powerfully collaborating with a politics and culture which placed a high premium on modernity, progress and reform" (4). Thomas Babington Macaulay celebrated steam engines and the Lays of Ancient Rome (1842); W. E. Gladstone could discuss the second Reform Bill with detailed allusions to the Aeneid; Lucretius was used to frame the debates about science and the humanities that were ultimately provoked by Charles Darwin. Rome offered a model for the expanding Victorian empire, and the Latin language was the passport for the ruling establishment in the colonies.

But Victorian interest in Roman Britain, as opposed to Roman Italy or the more general Idea of Rome, has not been the subject of study before. In the nineteenth century, trains could take tourists to Hadrian's Wall or the recently excavated Roman pavements in Bath or Cirencester. Vestiges of the Roman past were available on Britons' metaphorical doorstep, not only in dusty libraries or exotic foreign destinations. What impact did this have upon the Victorian imagination?

Virginia Hoselitz's book implicitly revolves around a series of intriguing paradoxes. Classical Rome was an imperial power, but Roman Britain could be considered an occupied colony. A study of Roman Britain therefore raises the vexed question of sympathy for the conquered Britons or allegiance with the conquering Romans. Moreover, classical accounts of Roman Britain were scanty, while material remains from that era were increasingly being uncovered. The archaeological record could sometimes seem at odds with the textual account, throwing into question the assumed primacy of the revered classical histories of Livy or Tacitus. Finally, the discovery and destruction of Roman remains in Britain were curiously intertwined, since it was the building of railways and sewers that unearthed evidence of the Roman past but simultaneously destroyed it. The emphasis upon modern progress—so pressing a concern in the Victorian period—also produced a renewed interest in the past.

These contradictions provide the starting point for an investigation into the ambivalent legacy of Roman Britain in the nineteenth century. Most interesting is Hoselitz's discussion concerning the complex question of Britain's national origins. She argues that the Victorians were torn between admiring the Roman colonists and citing them as their ancestors—and therefore interpreting their excavated palaces, pavements, and plumbing as sophisticated, elegant forerunners of their own modern civilisation—and sympathising with the indigenous Britons, who were the victims of the invasion and who mounted various brave but doomed campaigns of resistance. As Victorian attitudes to its own empire waxed and waned, one ancient resistance leader, Queen Boudica, was variously represented as "the patriot leading her people against foreign domination," then as "the almost demented leader of a savage revolt," and finally as "the personification of Britannia" (36–37). Hoselitz draws on statues and daguerrotypes of the figures of Boudica and Caractacus to support her description of their fluctuating value. One answer to this national genealogical dilemma between Roman and Briton was to focus attention upon the Saxon past. Thomas Arnold had claimed in 1842 that "our history clearly begins with the coming over of the Saxons; the Britons and the Romans had lived in our country but they are not our fathers" (qtd. in Hoselitz 43), and Hoselitz concludes that "as the image of the ancient Britons and the Romans became more ambiguous and troublesome, so did the Saxons appear ever more attractive as potential ancestors" (45).

This investigation could have been pursued further, but Hoselitz is diverted by her other major concern in the book, which is to explore...